Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Tianren Luo is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature. An interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and activist, they work at the intersections of racial capitalism, extractivism, decolonial theory, and contemporary art criticism, with a focus on postcolonial Africa and Asia. Their dissertation examines financialization and racial capitalism through postcolonial "global cities" — including Tangier, Johannesburg, and Singapore — tracing how these cities have consolidated multiple modes of accumulation since the 1980s while remaining shaped by the afterlives of colonialism. The project also attends to how these urban formations are mapped, contested, and reimagined through the work of local artist-activists forging new forms of Afro-Asian transnational solidarity. Their writing has appeared in venues including positions politics, Theory, Culture & Society, ASAP/Review, and Critical Asian Studies, among others.